But on the “personality cluster”—competitiveness, risk tolerance, independent-mindedness often to the point of contrarianism—Silicon Valley is off the charts, even compared to Wall Street. And it is quite proud of this. “We believe in embracing variance, in increasing interestingness,” wrote Marc Andreessen, the Netscape cofounder turned VC whose egg-shaped head is synonymous in the Valley with hard-boiled, stubborn resolve, in his October 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto.” “We believe in risk,” he wrote, italicizing the word “risk,” “in leaps into the unknown.”
